


beneath the skin

by thingswithwings



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Coming Out Sensate, M/M, Other, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 14:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15487872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: Prompt fic for Laura Shapiro, for the prompt: "Missing scene -- Lito tells Dani and Hernando that he's a sensate."





	beneath the skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurashapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro/gifts).



> I was having trouble getting back into writing, so I threw open prompts at my DW journal and wrote fast and hard. These fics are all quick and unbetaed, with very little research done, as I was just trying to get some practice in and get back in the writing mode. Apologies for any continuity errors etc. Thanks to everyone who prompted and encouraged me! And apologies to subscribers, who are now getting spammed as I repost them to AO3. 
> 
> Original prompt post here: https://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/226811.html

The first truth is: if he didn't have Nomi in the back of his mind, he never would've gotten the courage to do it. Seeing her with Amanita, how easily Neets had accepted the fact of Nomi's new bizarre shared reality – seeing that had given Lito something tantalizing to reach for. After all, as good as he is at keeping secrets, he's never tried to keep them from Hernando, and it feels wrong not to be able to turn to him and tell him about the club Riley's playing or the passenger Capheus is rolling his eyes at. 

The second truth is: he's not _good_ at keeping secrets from Hernando, or from Dani, for that matter. That's how they each wormed their way into his life in the first place, and it's not as if they haven't been noticing when he suddenly laughs for no reason or talks to the corner of the room. Knowing that they're waiting for him to tell, waiting patiently to hear what he needs to say and carefully not pushing, that makes it easier too.

The third truth is: he's starting to get used to the feeling of having others underneath his skin, brushing up against everything he contains, beautiful and ugly. He thinks – and the privacy-obsessed, isolated Lito of a year ago would be shocked by this – he thinks he's starting to like it, the shivering sensation of hands caressing the naked, sensitive shape of his soul. He wants more. He wants to bring his intimacies together and let them spark against one another.

He speaks after sex, when he's always been able to utter truths into the stillness of the air, into the halfway space between arousal and sleep. Dani may already be asleep; when Lito speaks, it's without the knowledge of whether she'll hear or not. He lets himself be comfortable with the possibility that she will.

Hernando is still awake, or awake enough to be trailing his fingertips in soft circles over Lito's chest. 

"Maybe you've been wondering why I've been acting so strange lately," Lito says. It's neither a question nor a statement, just words hanging in an in-between space where they don't require a response.

Hernando hums softly. It's a meaningless, almost noiseless utterance, but it feels warm and soothing, Hernando's throat vibrating against Lito's shoulder, his breath moving along Lito's skin. They're already intertwined, Lito thinks, interpenetrated. Hernando was the first to ever get under his skin. 

Lito takes a breath, and then another, and then another, waiting for the breath that will expel the words from his throat. He's reminded of a play he did, before his big break, when he forgot his line and the audience and the other actors waited as the seconds after his cue ticked by. He remembers feeling each of those seconds individually, as an eternity of empty space seeking to swallow him up. In the end, one of the other actors in the scene had to prompt him, and he'd felt tears of relief and shame spring unexpectedly to his eyes. After that play, Lito became obsessive about scripts, making sure he never again found himself in that endless limbo of excruciating expectation. He's never forgotten a line since; he's famous for it.

He doesn't have a script now, so he breathes through the silence. Hernando breathes with him (Lito feels the warm air from his lungs), and Dani, on the other side of the bed, breathes too (Lito watches her chest rising and falling). Under his skin, the other sensates are breathing in sync with him. Will and Riley hold each other. Kala blinks slowly in the still-dark of the last hours of the night. Sun stretches her arms towards the breaking dawn. 

"I have other people, living inside of me," Lito says. "In my head. And I live in their heads. We feel what the others feel, taste and smell and hear with them. We see through each others' eyes. Like a kind of telepathy. I started feeling them a few months ago, and now . . . " He trails off, not sure how to describe the now. He breathes again, tries again: "Now we're all together. All connected."

Dani was awake after all; her eyes open slowly and she blinks once, her eyes focusing. She smiles, sweet and delighted, that open and generous smile that Lito loves so well. He hopes it's not a smile to placate him until they can have him committed.

"Hernando," Dani says, her voice raspy with the edge of sleep, "you owe me twenty pesos."

Lito's mouth opens in shock, but then he finds himself laughing. Dani surprises him; Dani always surprises him. "You had a bet?"

"Technically, we had a bet on whether you were having some kind of spiritual experience," Hernando corrects, reaching for his glasses on the nightstand and setting them atop his nose. "I said you were merely in the throes of a newly-awakened creative passion that your coming out enabled you to access. I don't owe you anything, Dani, he wasn't talking to God."

"So they're real? The people in your head?" Dani asks. 

Lito smiles, and holds Hernando closer with his left arm while holding up his right arm for Dani to join them. She does, snuggling in on his other side. "They're real. I have their phone numbers." 

Hernando's trailing fingertips move up to Lito's temple and hesitate against his skin, as if he could reach in and find Capheus there, or Wolfgang, or Nomi. "And you share their bodies," he whispers, eyes searching Lito's face in wonder.

"It's called being a sensate," Lito explains. He tries to translate, but there's no real Spanish word that matches it. When he'd been in Nomi's head, the English had made sense to him, had even been funny, a pun. On his own, he can't appreciate the flavor of it, and shakes his head. "Eight people share their minds."

"And their souls," Dani breathes. 

Lito blinks back tears, suddenly, overwhelmed by that old feeling of shame and relief when someone else says his line for him. "And our souls," Lito agrees.

Dani snuggles against his side contentedly. "Sounds like a spiritual experience to me."

Hernando laughs. Lito kisses him, desperate and aching, and Hernando kisses back, then cups Lito's jaw in his hand. "I understand why you didn't tell us, my love." 

"It sounds crazy," Lito says. Hernando brushes away one of the tears that had fallen, his thumb gentle against Lito's eyelashes.

"It sounds beautiful, too," he breathes. Lito sees in his eyes the same light he saw on their first date, the look he gets when he looks at art, the look he gets when he's falling in love. It makes Lito feel bright, shining under Hernando's appreciative gaze. He feels seen.

"Tell us about them," Dani murmurs. "Your other family."

Hernando kisses his lips again, softly. "Yes. Tell us."

Lito does, for hours, until his throat goes hoarse and he resigns himself to having to skip rehearsal tomorrow.

He never once runs out of things to say.


End file.
